Khan, Pretorius and the Cigarette Raids: What the General’s Phone Showed the Madlanga Commission
The Madlanga Commission has begun reading WhatsApp messages extracted from 2 iPhones seized at Major General Feroz Khan’s Houghton home, and they allegedly show the suspended Crime Intelligence officer coordinating police action with Carnilinx director Mohammed Sayed against the company’s competitors in the illegal tobacco trade. The same chats connect Khan to the late Wiandre Pretorius, a former police reservist tied by earlier sworn testimony to a torture killing. Khan was shot on 28 June, roughly 48 hours before he was due to testify, and has not responded to any of the evidence. Evidence leader Advocate Matthew Chaskalson told the commission the significance is not that the tobacco laws went unenforced, but that they were being administered selectively.
There was an empty chair at the Madlanga Commission on Monday. Major General Feroz Khan, the suspended Crime Intelligence officer whose testimony was meant to be one of the inquiry’s defining moments, lay in a hospital bed with gunshot wounds while Advocate Matthew Chaskalson read his private WhatsApp messages into the public record.
The messages come from 2 iPhones seized during a May raid on Khan’s home. Khan went to court to keep the devices away from the commission, withdrew that challenge in June, and was shot outside his home on 28 June, roughly 48 hours before he was scheduled to sit in the witness chair. Nothing currently connects those events beyond their sequence, and this article makes no claim that they are connected. The evidence itself, however, is now on the record, and it tells a story that reaches from a torture killing to the tobacco shelves of half the country’s shops.
The general and the reservist
Earlier in the commission’s life, a protected witness known as Witness D said Wiandre Pretorius, a former police reservist, belonged to a criminal theft and extortion gang made up of members of the Ekurhuleni Metro Police. Witness D said the gang tortured Emmanuel Mbense to death during one of its operations, and that when the group stood debating what to do with the body, Pretorius suggested they call General Khan to fix it.
That was a single claim from a single witness. Monday’s evidence began filling in the relationship behind it.
In January 2021, Khan posted a birthday photograph of himself next to a man the commission has independently identified as Pretorius. When a contact asked who it was, Khan answered: “Vandre.” Days later, on 14 January, an officer whose name the commission has withheld messaged Khan: “Hi General, with your permission I’m issuing Vandre with a permit, just letting you know.” Khan raised no problem. The officer added: “We need team players on our side.”
Chaskalson told the commissioners the inquiry does not know what the permit was, whether it was lawfully issued, or what it purported to allow Pretorius to do. What the record does show is a former reservist, already named in connection with a torture killing, receiving some form of authorisation on the personal say-so of a Crime Intelligence general.
By May 2021, Carnilinx director Mohammed Sayed was sending Khan videos of Pretorius posing with an unmarked car fitted with blue lights. Khan responded that he was looking sharp. Sayed captioned a later set: “That’s how we roll. Boys in blue.”
The commission’s reading of the chats is that Khan placed Pretorius with Sayed, where his work would involve raids on Carnilinx’s competitors in the illegal tobacco market. In June 2021, Sayed asked Khan to handle Pretorius’s resignation from his previous position and to tell a man named Shaheen “that you placed him by me for other reasons”. Khan replied: “I discussed it with Vandre. We have a plan.” Chaskalson said the commission believes it knows who Shaheen is and will establish it with certainty before the inquiry ends.
A bust run over WhatsApp
The relationship’s working product appears in the chats around a June 2021 cigarette bust in Benoni. Khan opened the sequence by messaging Sayed that Pretorius had a lead on a big cigarette bust on the East Rand, and suggested Sayed give him a call.
Chaskalson paused the hearing to spell out what that message was: a Crime Intelligence general notifying an executive in the tobacco industry of a coming bust in that industry. He said a bust is something for the police to conduct, not something industry players are told about while it happens.
Voice notes played into the record then track the operation in real time. Pretorius reports the truck arriving and the cigarettes being offloaded. Sayed asks Khan: “Must I send the boys there to Benoni as well?” The commission does not know who these boys were, or whether they were police at all. Pretorius asks for “the big brass to be there so they can assist us and take over the scene”. Photographs follow of suspects on the ground and cigarette packs found on a truck loaded with bags of sweets.
Khan’s response to the operation, at page 6069 of the exhibit: “Great work, brother.” Sayed answered that it was all thanks to him.
Competitors by name
The chats then move from a single raid to what looks like a standing arrangement. On 11 June 2021, Sayed sent Khan the location of competitor Protobac’s factory in East London’s old Union Cotton Mills building, naming its Pacific and Pegasus brands, and ended: “I need to f them out of sight.” Khan’s full reply was “okay bro”.
A month later, Sayed forwarded Khan an official SAPS tweet celebrating a raid on that factory, followed by what appears to be an extract from the SAPS register of detained goods: 152 boxes of raw tobacco at 200kg each and 1127 boxes of cut rag at 200kg each. Sayed wrote that Protobac was doing funnies via a bond store, that police would pounce on the bond store the following week, and that the company faced penalties of about R120 million. A private businessman, in other words, held advance notice of a coming police operation against his competitor, down to the target and the timing.
Gold Leaf Tobacco, whose primary brand is Remington Gold, received similar attention. In April 2021 Khan himself forwarded Sayed a SAPS report on seizures of Remington Gold, and asked: “Did Green tell you?” The general evidently expected that someone named Green would already have briefed the executive. By June, Sayed was asking whether Khan had anyone at the Komati border post who could check “if they intercepted the truck for us”, and receiving updates that read like status reports, ending with: “We flagged about 15 trucks of GL and now it’s paying off.”
The whistle blew one way
The same chats show what happened when enforcement attention turned towards Carnilinx itself. Through 2021, Tax Justice South Africa founder Yusuf Abramjee published research using the minimum collectible tax, the total tax owed on a packet of cigarettes, as a fraud test. Any packet retailing below that figure must involve tax evasion, since the price sits below the tax alone, never mind production cost.
Abramjee’s July 2021 post pointed at Gold Leaf, but it also recorded that purchases of Carnilinx brands below the minimum collectible tax had risen by a third. Sayed forwarded it to Khan with the message that Abramjee was “going to get effed up brew”. Khan replied: “yes f him up bro he must stay in his lane.”
By October 2021, the research placed Carnilinx first, with 62% of its brands found below the minimum collectible tax. Sayed sent the post to Khan with the message: “This P is asking for it bro.” Khan replied: “we can sort it out easily.”
Chaskalson put the pattern to the commission in a single sentence: “It’s not that these laws are not being administered, it’s that they are being administered selectively.”
What the selectivity means
That sentence deserves more weight than it will get in most coverage. A police service that does nothing announces its own failure. A police service that raids, seizes and issues celebratory tweets, while allegedly allowing a private player to choose the targets, produces headlines that look exactly like justice. Every SAPS post about a successful tobacco raid in these chats was technically true. What the public could not see was the selection process, which on Monday’s evidence allegedly ran through a WhatsApp thread between a general and a cigarette executive.
The arrangement, if proven, was not a failure of enforcement capacity. The trucks were intercepted and the registers were filled in. It was the direction of enforcement that had allegedly been privatised, and that is a more dangerous condition than inaction, because it hides inside the appearance of a working system.
The denials, and the silences
Sayed has publicly denied colluding with Khan to eliminate Carnilinx competitors. He has said he provided Khan, as the officer responsible for border security, with information about illicit tobacco smugglers, casting himself as an informant doing his civic duty. The chats complicate that account, because the information in them flows predominantly the wrong way: seizure registers, advance notice of raids and border interception updates travelling from the state to the businessman.
Khan has answered nothing. He has not testified, the allegations against him are untested, and the commission has indicated it wants him to explain the exchanges under oath. He is entitled to that opportunity, and this publication will report his version when it comes.
Whether it comes is another matter. Pretorius shot himself at a Brakpan petrol station in February after being named at the commission in connection with Mbense’s killing. Khan remains in hospital. The 2 men at the centre of Monday’s evidence cannot currently speak, and one never will. The chats, however, survived them both, and the commission resumes with more of them, including a video in which Pretorius describes cigarettes hidden under packets of sweets and bananas.
Don’t just know what is happening, understand what it means.
